Wrong Feast
poems by Rivka Clifton
In Rivka Clifton’s sophomore collection, Wrong Feast, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism’s mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry. In these poems, Clifton engages Charles Simic’s surrealist question: “How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates.” Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny–a fish becomes a purse, a dog’s head deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone birthed into a crib . . . These are not poems of action and consequence but ones of call and response. Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention. Clifton fully considers the ambiguities and the possibilities within her creations, and she challenges you to do the same.
These poems will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails. They are the entrails
“In Wrong Feast, Rivka Clifton offers us entire, unforgettable worlds—glorious coexistences of mystery and clarity—embodying the unsettling overlaps and interstices of encounter. It’s a profound pleasure to witness this poet’s imagination as it digs deep into the work it was so clearly meant to do, unfolding visions with a music so naturally and powerfully realized, the progressions seem to have emerged from the very helixes of language itself. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that made new for me, to this extent, the fundamental strangeness of existence; I am grateful to Wrong Feast for reminding me how attention opens us to astonishment: in a poem, in a life.”
Book Details
Title: Wrong Feast
Author: Rivka Clifton
Publication Date: September 8, 2026
Trade Paperback
6 x 9 in.
80 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936097-72-2
$16.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
